Getting the bridge location right is one of those moments in a build where the stakes feel higher than usual.Get it wrong and your intonation is off. Or the strings drift toward the edge of the fretboard. Neither of those is a quick fix after the fact.At first glance, this feels like a trivial task; center the bridge on the center line of the body. Done. After a few builds, you come to realize that even measuring as carefully as you can, might leave you a little off center.The worst is when you do get it perfectly centred on the body, but realise your bolt-on neck sits at the tiniest of an angle, and now your perfectly centred bridge has pulled the strings too close to one side of the fretboard. So how do we solve this?The standard approach is to place the neck in the pocket and use a long metal ruler to project the sides of the fretboard along the body. Then you mark your intonation line at the correct scale length from the nut.It works. But for something that needs to be this precise, there’s room for small measurement errors to sneak in. And small errors in bridge placement are the kind you don’t notice until the strings are on.What if you could let the strings tell you exactly where the bridge needs to go?Here’s how it works. First, you’ll need an inexpensive trapeze tailpiece like the kind found on many archtop guitars.Temporarily install the tailpiece using the strap button hole at the tail end of the body. On most electric guitar designs, that hole is already in exactly the right spot, so there’s no unnecessary drilling.With the tailpiece in place, install the two outer E-strings. As an added bonus, before you locate the bridge, you get a preview of how the strings fall relative to the outer edges of the fretboard.The strings let you confirm the alignment better than any amount of measuring could.Next, position the bridge under the strings so that each one lands nicely on its saddle. That takes care of the side-to-side location. Then move the bridge along the strings to the correct position for the scale length line measured from the nut,Once the bridge is sitting exactly where it belongs, carefully mark the hole location and you’re ready to drill.Here’s the type of tailpiece you’ll need (Amazon) for this. It’s inexpensive and makes a sometimes stressful job a lot more enjoyable.
There’s one important thing to note: often these tailpieces are quite long because they’re designed for guitars with large bodies, like an ES335. On a smaller build like Telecaster, a long tailpiece can interfere with the location of the bridge you’re trying to locate. Fortunately, there are also short versions of the tailpiece that work perfectly for our purposes.
